A couple of letters.
On Sunday, October 13, 2013 8:54:11 AM, Share Long <sharelon...@yahoo.com> wrote: Ok, emptybill, it's been a long time since I heard about smriti and shruti and it looks like no one else is gonna ask so: what is the difference between them? On Sunday, October 13, 2013 10:41 AM, "emptyb...@yahoo.com" <emptyb...@yahoo.com> wrote: Questioner: So you’re talking about Yoga and Vedanta to give some sort of context to his enlightement? Ram: Yes. Now that Ramana is getting fame it is rather sad to see all these Western people coming to Tiruvannamalai with absolutely no notion of the context of his enlightenment and his life, with no understanding of the depth of the Vedic tradition and burdened with amazing and ill-considered views of enlightenment based on their Ramana fantasies. Anyway, Ramana’s type of realization, because it did not occur at the feet of a guru in a traditional Vedantic classroom, is more in line with the tradition of Yoga, although most yogis do not become jnanis as Ramana did. His lifestyle too, sitting in meditation in a cave, is more typical of the yogic tradition than the Vedantic. The reason yogis do not usually become jnanis is because they have often been confused by the language of Yoga into thinking of enlightenment as a permanent experience of samadhi. So when the experience is ‘on’ they are not looking to understand anything, they are simply trying to make the state permanent, sahaja. The joke is that enlightenment is not an experience, nor is there any permanent experience. Furthermore, they do not realize that to make an experience permanent one would have to be a doer, an agent acting on the experience, maintaining it or controlling it or staying in it … which is a dualistic state, not enlightenment.
